Hi, On Sat, Apr 7, 2012 at 7:12 PM, Michael B. Brutman <mbbrut...@brutman.com> wrote: > > For hard-core application programming where you need to use a few BIOS > and DOS interrupts I like to use C and C++ (carefully). C gives you a > tremendous amount of control and flexibility. > > Open Watcom is open source and is regularly updated, but it is loosing > critical mass. It seems to be a fairly well kept secret, which I don't > understand.
OpenWatcom is awesome, but ... 1). It's only OSI approved, not FSF approved. (Yeah, I know.) 2). No shared library support on GNU/Linux. 3). 32-bit max. only, no 64-bit (except unfinished Alpha support). 4). incomplete C99, a fair bit less than latest GCC 5). slightly less target optimizations (but still good) So that's my guess why more people don't use it. As for "loosing critical mass", it's not dead yet, though Google Groups isn't letting people post to the OpenWatcom groups anymore (too much spam??), so you have to use something else (e.g. Opera and connect directly to news.openwatcom.org or use Eternal September, aioeu, etc). There supposedly will be a 2.0 release later this year, but the maintainer (Peter Chapin) has been busy with other things (work?), hence the delay from last time (1.9, approx. 2 years ago). > (PS: If we have FreeDOS code that doesn't compile under OW I'd be > interested in seeing it. A few #defines can fix a lot of problems. The > debugging is the hard part.) There is a tcc2wat "library" by Blair Campbell on iBiblio, if anyone wants to take a look: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/devel/libs/tcc2wat/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Better than sec? Nothing is better than sec when it comes to monitoring Big Data applications. Try Boundary one-second resolution app monitoring today. Free. http://p.sf.net/sfu/Boundary-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
